martin jinoch

The 7th SUTOL technical conference will be held in Prague on 11 November 2015. I am really happy to announce that this is the first time when we actively ask speakers outside of Czech Lotus community to submit abstracts and (possibly) to come to Prague and do a presentation. Sessions should be presented in English (or in Czech as we expect the audience to be mostly Czech, except for some speakers).

End of the year is approaching at increasing speed (more deadlines you have, more speed you get) and as we’re headed to our annual vacation soon, I’m calling this year “a day”. (this probably doesn’t work in English as I mean it, but you understand it, right?) It started right after we returned from Vietnam at the end of January, with a lot of projects to catch up on, followed by speaking at ENGAGE with Paul Withers and being on This Week in Lotus discussion panel (yes, THAT This week in Lotus which “made” me to go to my first BLUG ever in 2011 and subsequently to speaking at BLUG in 2012). I can not thank Stuart and Theo enough for what they’re doing for the community, and what they both have done for me personally.

I’m very honoured to be selected as IBM Champion in Collaboration Solutions for 2015. I’m very very very happy to be on the list with so many great people. 96 people from all around the world. Two of them from Czech Republic. Congratulations to all IBM Champions 2015! To people who nominated me: Thank you for the nominations! P.S.: my secret tip how to become IBM Champion is to wear a wig while working at the registration desk for Social Connections conference, but shhh :-)

We did it again! Two day conference for over 160 people, packed with IBM Connections related (and social software in general) content. Organizing team had 7 active members, who worked at their free time to prepare and run this event. Photo by Oliver Heinz Thursday and Friday last week in Stockholm at Odenplan 7a conference center we had many great sessions and plenty of networking with people from around the world. Which is exactly what I LOVE about these events.

For me the end of the summer means increased number of projects I’m involved in. To finish all of them until the end of the year - that is something I’ve never managed to achieve. This year seems to be a bit different. Hopefully. Up until now I’ve resisted to say yes for too many of “just a small 10 mandays work” (usually ending up as 50 MD). One of the reasons is that after Social Connections VI in Prague I’m part of the team preparing the next event - Social Connections VII in Stockholm. The most important reason is that unlike previous years I’d like to start our annual winter holiday trip less exhausted and without eyelids twiching.

Well, that was really great experience to be part of the team organizing Social Connection VI conference in Prague. Our team was working hard to make it happen. All other members were also presenting, which I can only admire. I can not imagine myself doing all that work AND preparing for the session(s) as well. Let alone being able to deliver it. After spending some time at the registration booth I’m a bit afraid that my new nickname “registration booth babe” will be with me for some time. It is, after all, my fault: shouldn’t have tweeted it. There are already people planning to make it worse :-)

In the beginning of this week I’ve attended the best European “Lotus related” conference called now Engage, up until last year named BLUG. For the first time it has taken place outside of Belgium in a nice city called Breda located one hour (by fast train) from Amsterdam. Venue was also very interesting - Chassé Theater. There is no need to point out that organization of the conference was fantastic, because that is automatically assumed when you know who is organizing it - Theo Heselmans. I was at four BLUGs (including this one) and every time agenda and everything else was just perfect. Two times I had the privilege to speak at the conference and the way Theo’s wife and he are treating speakers is one of the highlights of this event for me. Starting with welcome which feels like you’re a part of their family, excellent social events and diners and gifts for speakers and sponsors and ending with all the chocolate in speakers room! Just wow!

Tomorrow morning I’ll be heading to the airport to catch flight to Amsterdam and then via train to Breda to attend ENGAGE conference (it used to be called BLUG). I’m always looking forward to being there. I hope to meet a lot of old friends and even more new ones. I persuaded a couple of Lotus-positive friends to come this year, so be prepared for more Czech geeks :-) This is my second time as a speaker on this event so I’m even more excited to go there. Paul Withers and I will be presenting on OpenNTF Domino API, on Tuesday, March 18 at 14.45 in room D. You can find complete agenda of the conference here.

I finally had some time to try new “experimental” feature that has been added to IBM Notes in 9.0.1 release. And it is the ability to automatically take repository containing so called on-disk project and build NSF out of it. Which is something you probably do daily, but you have to do it manually in Designer. After couple of tweets about this matter Jonathan Roche from IBM offered me help in case I have any problems. I always have problems ;-) But this was easy… What was missing in slides from IBM Connect 2014 session AD209: Making Your Development Team More Productive with IBM Domino Designer is the need to add one notes.ini variable. Thanks a lot Jonathan! I wish all problems with IBM sofware are solved like this one.

This year’s last digit is going to be the first digit of my age. And that makes me think a lot. Because I always considered age as something not important. I have friends of all ages and have never really cared about how old is a person I’m dealing with. But since my very good friend died 5 years ago and my father died nearly 2 years ago, I started to be aware of age a bit. I still feel like being in my late twenties except I no longer can drink all night and be ready next morning. Nope, it takes now a full day to recover. And there is no way I can/want drink all night. Evening is enough. I do not consider this as a problem. But one has to see a correlation between this and getting older.